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Digital Media has possibly been one of my favorite classes. I have always been a huge fan of graphic design and something I have considered going into as a career or to study in college. This class combined journalism, graphic design, and many other details in writing and tips for yearbook that have all been a huge part of how I see things now. I can now critique and point out things in magazines that many people would not even notice. It is like I have a different eye for things now and is something that I can remember for a long time.

I loved how small the class was and how lenient Mrs. Huddleston was with due dates/work days. I have already recommended this class to many people that are interested in this kind of thing. If there were anything I would change about this class it would be that I think all the projects should be spread out. We had a lot of projects in the 2nd quarter and I think if they were divided up between the two it would have been as difficult.

This class has taught me a lot and I wish it could be a whole year. There is so much we could expand on with what we know now. I will keep up with this blog for my server members and subscribers and I have gotten a friend to start his own blog. Thank you Mrs. Huddleston for an awesome class!

So here we are today, following up my recent post on examples of good graphic design. I mean, you knew this would come sooner or later. We will go through the Top Terrible Examples of Graphic Design, or TTEGD. From the classic no-effort websites, to the *facepalm* examples of logos… THIS IS TTEGD! (commence the cheezy gameshow music)

If I could describe this website in one word it would be puzzle. The thing that amazes me about this site is the fact that they it is a Christian website with a gif of a panther running and a bright rainbow background scrolling the the right. The website seems as if you stare too long, eye damage is ever so possible. I am not even sure if they wanted to make this website serious, but if they really wanted to promote Christianity, I would first remove the creepy messages advertising eternal life.

Accept Jesus, Forever Forgiven

Finishing us off with the Number 1 worst example of graphic design is: Check Point Software Technologies Logo! http://www.checkpoint.com/

I am going to be straightforward and say it. Check Point Technologies Ltd has the worst logo I have ever seen. It looks as if they hired a toddler to draw their logo. I can guarantee that they sat the kid down in front of a desktop computer and gave him bright colored crayons. This is not something I would want my business to be remembered by.

Thanksgiving is very laid back in my family, as is every holiday. We almost never have guests over and there usually aren’t many activities planned. Whenever there is a break, we enjoy it as best as we can and however we want. My older sister came in town and met up with all of her friends, my dad played with his new iPhone 4S for countless hours, I caught up on managing my server, my mom started Christmas shopping, and my little sister played with her friends.

Although, this year we did get something fun for the whole family, a Foosball table. It was what most of our break surrounded this year, and we have all gotten pretty good at it. On thanksgiving day we played Foosball, ate, went to a friends house where we played with them on their Foosball table. They talked us into getting one, and I am very glad we did. I think that Foosball competitions will be added to our small list of activities on Thanksgiving day and I hope we are much better by next year.

As for the meal: my sisters made homemade macaroni and cheese, my mom roasted the turkey in our crock pot, a my dad made the butternut squash soup and garlic green beans. That is a typical thanksgiving meal for us, but we had dessert when we went to our friends home.

We don’t usually stuff ourselves on thanksgiving, but this year, it wasn’t hard.

We are coming up on our last month in Digital Media and have been focusing on critiquing spreads and different graphic designs. I have found 4 great examples of graphic design. Two of which, are websites, and the other two are logos. I had some magazines that I was going to use, but I think I recycled them on accident. Anyway, here are some good forms of graphic designs:

Websites

1)Apple
Apple is one of the most successful businesses in the world, and they are good at what they do. They are known for visually amazing products and advertisements. If you have ever bought an Apple product, you may notice the perfection and precision in their manufacturing. Putting their products aside, their ads and websites match what they make beautifully. I am going to make this short since I could write and entire blog about Apple, but if you just look at their advertisements and website, you notice one thing, WHITE SPACE. It is one of the many things we have learned about graphic design, and it is very important too. White space fills in and directs you toward the primary element on the page. Apple uses white space like no ones business. With all the white space, it brings your entire focus on the big picture, which is what they are trying to sell you.

BlueXephos, better known as The Yogscast, is one of the world’s most popular gaming commentators. The Yogscast consists of Simon and Lewis from the United Kingdom. Not only are they hilarious, but their YouTube’s Channel art is amazing. Although it was probably the work of devoted fans, it is still my favorite channel art ever. I have spent more than 8 hours on a YouTube background myself, and it can’t compare to theirs. If you are a fan of their videos, you will understand some of the art. Those of you who don’t, your missing out.

I want whoever did this to be my mentor....

This is what I made in PhotoShop... 8 hours

Logos

1) Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla has a very interesting logo. I have always liked it because of the colors and quality of such a small logo. I really like putting a lot of visual effects into something small, its gives a great result. Back in 2002, their logo was much more rustic and looked mainly hand drawn, then again they were not the #2 web browser, so they have an excuse.

Years of the Firefo-... is that a Phoenix in 2002?

2) Starbucks

Recently Starbucks has changed its logo. That means, new cups, new napkins, new signs/billboards, etc. in all of its stores. I hadn’t really noticed anything different in the effect of the new design, other than the fact that they removed the text. After the lesson in digital media on emphasis and balance, it caught my eye and I understood why they did this now. They are trying to force less emphasis on the “Starbucks Coffee” and more on their original logo. That way, you notice the logo more and it gives it more emphasis. An example of another company doing this would be Nike. In their original logo, it said “nike” across their famous whoosh, but now it is removed. If you think about it, when you see an athlete sponsoring Nike, you immediately recognize its Nike because of their signature logo, not the text. That is exactly what Starbucks is doing here.

Recently my YouTube channel has been going through many popularity spikes and changes, and with that I thought I decided to start promoting something that I spend a bit more time on than anything else, my gaming servers.

If you do not know this already, I am a pretty big gamer. I mean, I have to put that computer I built to some use, right? But, yes, I am a gamer, but I am a bit more interactive in the actual up-keep of the gaming community. Instead of spending countless hours of playing the games, I decided to start managing servers for games I love. For example, Minecraft.

As you can see in my background, I very much do love Minecraft. Minecraft is a first-person sandbox style game in which you mine for materials and place blocks to create amazing creations. To me, its Legos with a twist. Anyway, the game is very popular and just sold its 4 millionth copy, which is VERY impressive for an Indie game. My favorite part about this game is the capability to run servers, in which, your friends and any other players can join and build in a world with you.

Setting up servers is not easy though, and either you pay a company to host a server for you, or you go out and purchase a server with RAID and plenty of memory to be sure it can handle 10+ people at once. Now, unless you are really into it, and are willing to put a lot of money into a powerful machine, I would recommend getting a hosted server, which is what I do. I pay a monthly fee to maintain a server that my members play on every day. Now, don’t think I am taking a shortcut. If I had a server to host at my own home, I would, but I don’t. I know how to set up the server files and port-forward the IP and blah blah blah… but it is just very expensive to manage that kind of thing, and I much rather have a company who houses hundreds of powerful machines do it for me.

Anyway, I run this server. On my server I am known as Hobojoe, or Hobo, as everyone calls me (I made it up years ago, I know its silly). All my servers are a part of HoboServers and we have a website and everything. Check out www.hoboservers.com and we have a Facebook page, the whole deal. The website is currently a wix.com site, just because I am still working on the final site in Dreamweaver and it is taking forever.

My servers are become quite popular these days and with our upgrade from 10 open server slots, to 20 slots, we have gained about 7 active members, to our, 8 members. Our staff is made up of 5 people, including me. Our admins: Cafgeo (George), 15, lives in North Carolina and is the head Admin. Lalli87 (Larus), 15 years old and lives in Iceland. Gamergabo (Gabe), 13 years old and lives in Nevada. IN7OMNIA (Abbie), 14 years old, she lives in the UK. Lastly, Apple Crack (Edan), 14 and lives in California. These are all our admins and they constantly manage the server during the week and whenever I cannot get on. As you have noticed, they live in very different places. We have Larus and Abbie who are about 5 hours ahead of central time, and they manage the server on a different shift from Edan and Gabe, who are pacific time zone. George is on Mountain time, so we are pretty close in time zones. I didn’t mean to set it up this way, but it is very convenient on how we are in different times, and it is good that someone is on most of the time, because it is difficult to keep up with all the people. I have talked with these people very much and I trust them. Some, I have know since the begging of my server, and others are new, almost as of 2 months.

I don’t want to go into too much depth on how we manage the server, but depending on how active it is, we are typically very busy in helping new members or fixing problems, etc. You could almost consider us a tech support service for the game. Because of all the admins we have, they can almost run the server without me, which is why they are so awesome.

I plan to keep the server running as long as I can fund it and I encourage all of my active members to donate on the site. We do many server-wide weekend events and people can win prizes and other things. Most of the time I film the events and put them on my channel, but recently I have been letting the other admins put them on their channels.

Running a server is a great experience if you like meeting random people who might actually be cool, and other than that I just consider it a weekend job, like running my own business.

Following our discussions on the First Amendment and free speech, we have entered the ethics and legal issues journalists face today. One obvious issue that comes to mind is lying or inventing your own quotes, situations, or flat-out stories, in the case of Stephen Glass. Although captions in yearbook are not even close to front page stories in the New Republic, its all the same thing. When you present your piece to your editor, you are showing that all that you have written is 100% true. As we have learned, fabricated information is not protected by the First Amendment and is probably the #1 rule that journalists, if I can call myself one, always need to keep in mind when they submit their stories, captions, quotes. Hopefully, none of the yearbook staff end up frantically building bad websites to cover fabricated stories, in which case they would need to go through years of mental therapy. Anyway, this was a really interesting story and I can’t wait to see what follows this in our Digital Media Class.

Recently, I have received a YouTube partnership allowing me to monetize my YouTube videos and earn revenue from the advertisements on my channel. I have been waiting for this for a very long time. A partnership is the first step in becoming a successful YouTuber.

With this partnership I was given a Google AdSense account where I can see all the earnings I that my videos have generated. When I first received the partnership, I could only monetize one of my videos. Now, I have monetized all of my videos. Some of my videos have has copyright content and I cannot earn revenue off of them, but that is only one or two videos out of my 82 and counting. Since the beginning of the school year I have only been able to put off 5 videos, but I am counting on Christmas break to get me going again.

Once my channel gets over 100,000 views, I get the second step of the partnership where I can edit my channel with HTML and add links to my website or other things. That will be a while from now because I am only at 42,000 total views.

The monetized videos earn revenue when people click on the advertisements, which most people don’t. Therefore, I have barely made more than $20, which is not a bad start, but I wish it could be better.

My channel is growing fast and at this rate I expect to be on the second step of the partnership by February, so I am not worried about losing any steam on my channel.